Thursday, 30 May 2013

Kind Hearts and Coronets ?

Lord of all he surveys: Edward Richard Lambton the 7th Earl
of Durham with wife Marina in 2011.

The blue-blood family feud that would make Jeremy Kyle
blush: Their father quit as a minister
after being caught with a prostitute. Now, four of Lord Lambton's children are
battling over his millions - and this week it turned REALLY dirty

Surely it is a sign of the times that Edward Richard
Lambton, who as the 7th Earl of Durham is one of Britain’s loftiest
aristocrats, should chronicle his daily life via Facebook.

Here, the blue-blooded 51-year-old, who calls himself ‘Ned,’
offers his circle of upmarket ‘friends’ a glimpse at his rarefied existence.

In one corner of the site, you’ll see his striking property
Lambton Castle, the faux-Norman family seat in County Durham built by ancestor
John Lambton, a Victorian statesman.

In another, you can see nearby Biddick Hall, a ten-bedroom
Queen Anne house, surrounded by a 7,000-acre estate, where Ned was partly
raised, and which he now rents out for weddings and corporate jollies.

Friends can watch videos of Ned, who also owns a motor yacht
called Lone Wolf, playing guitar in his band, Pearl TN, in a studio near his
apartment in Kensington. They can also, if they so desire, ponder pictures of
Ned’s third wife Marina Hanbury, a former model 22 years his junior.

She can be seen variously showing off their bonny
18-month-old daughter, Lady Stella, beaming at her wedding to Ned in 2011, and
posing in lace underwear, in the couple’s bedroom, later that year.

But the most striking images of his recent life were surely
taken at the Villa Cetinale, his magnificent 12-bedroom pile in rural Tuscany.
The vast property, with its marble floors, four-poster beds, and sweeping
staircases, was purchased by Ned’s late father, Antony, in the Seventies.

It became famous as the bolthole to which Antony, the former
Tory minister better known as Lord Lambton, fled after being forced to resign
in 1973, when he was photographed in bed with two dominatrix prostitutes.

Last year, Ned invited Vanity Fair magazine, and its
photographer, to tour the palatial Villa Cetinale, which is set in 165 acres of gardens and
where his recent house guests included those paragons of virtue Kate Moss and
Jade Jagger.

Many of their photos captured the 17th-century baroque
property’s priceless collection of art, and antiquities, along with its
rambling gardens and olive groves. But some had an edgier feel.

. One particularly striking picture, for example, showed Ned
in chinos and a panama hat relaxing on a sun lounger alongside not one, but two
topless socialites — one blonde; the other brunette.

To the casual observer of these images, it would be fair to
assume the playboy Earl, whose inherited personal fortune — including his
estates — has been estimated at £180 million, enjoys a carefree life.

But reality is rarely quite as simple as it may first appear
— especially in the turbo-charged world of our aristocratic elite.

Indeed, a rather closer examination of Ned’s online activity
provides clues about the stupendously ugly controversy which has lately enveloped
the House of Lambton.

You get an immediate whiff of it by perusing the Earl’s
Facebook ‘friends’. There are 323, including an array of prominent toffs — from
Petronella Wyatt to the notorious former jailbird and drug addict James, the
Marquess of Blandford.

But not one of these ‘friends’ has the surname Lambton.

You get another clue from Ned’s ‘profile picture’ on the
social network. Recently, it was updated to an image of a volcano, surrounded by mushroom clouds. Before that,
it showed Ned, in martial arts clothes,
preparing to deliver a karate chop.

Both images are grimly appropriate. For Ned is currently a
man at war. And, as the absence of Lambtons from his friend circle suggests,
his opponents are among his closest relatives.

Last week, it emerged that the Earl had recently served a
writ at the High Court in London against three of his five elder sisters.

It was the latest development in an unseemly dispute that
stretches back to 2006, when Ned’s father died in Italy, at the age of 84.

The death allowed Ned to inherit the Earldom of Durham. He
also became the beneficiary of a vast property portfolio, which is largely
controlled, apparently for tax purposes, by overseas trusts.

Controversy was soon to break out, however, over his
father’s will, which valued his remaining estate at £12 million. It stipulated
that all of this money would be left to Ned. Not one of the five sisters was to
receive a penny.

Though in keeping with the English tradition of
primogeniture, under which first born sons inherit everything, those terms are
at odds with Italy’s Napoleonic law, which dictates that assets must be evenly
split between siblings.

The three sisters, Beatrix, Lucinda (known as Lucy), and
Anne, say they were led to believe that Ned would voluntarily offer them a
small portion of their father’s estate.

But it wasn’t forthcoming. They are therefore now attempting
to sue for a slice of the £12 million pot, which was largely comprised of
paintings by the neo-classical artist Josef Zoffany.

The sisters argue that since Antony had lived in Italy with
his mistress for two decades — and been resident there, for tax purposes, until
the time he died — his will ought to be subject to Italian law.

Indeed, in his will — a copy of which has been obtained by
this newspaper — Antony declared himself to be ‘domiciled, resident, and
ordinarily resident in Italy’.

Family Lambton: Baby Ned with his mother Lady Belinda known
as Bindy Lambton and sisters

After receiving Ned’s writ, the sisters said in a statement
that he ‘has always thrown his toys out of the pram. The only difference this
time is that the toys are his own family. It’s just terribly sad.’

None of them will now speak further about the Downton
Abbey-style dispute, saying they do not wish to jeopardise proceedings.

But no such concerns trouble Lucinda’s husband Sir Peregrine
Worsthorne, the former newspaper editor.

‘It’s a very sad business,’ he tells me. ‘It has broken up
the family, and it is poisoning our lives. Ned has been entirely irrational and
completely selfish. His treatment of his sisters has been highly insensitive.’

Sir Peregrine, 89, denies that the sisters are motivated by
greed, or an irrational jealousy of their younger brother. He says they’re
seeking a small portion of his estate, equating to roughly £1 million each.

‘A million sounds
like a lot, but it’s nothing to him,’ he adds. ‘He wouldn’t have to sell off
the castle or anything. He’s very rich, and they’re not asking for something he
couldn’t easily provide. But Ned just doesn’t like being told what to do.’

And if the Earl fails to relinquish the cash, Sir Peregrine
claims that the sisters will be left almost penniless. ‘This isn’t a case about
greed, but necessity,’ he says.

‘I mean, Lucy hasn’t got a bean. She’s worked all her life
in TV, and she’s 70 now. I’ve got my own children, so when I die she will be
left pretty hard up.’

Some of the money has already been promised by Lucinda to
her grandson to pay for him to attend boarding school. Because the cash has yet
to materialise, the child’s school was recently informed that he cannot attend.

‘It was rather embarrassing,’ adds Sir Peregrine.

The other two sisters — Anne, 58, is an actress and Beatrix,
63, is a widow — are for their part ‘extremely hard up’, he says.

‘They really have very little. They were never sent to
university, or allowed to learn how to earn a living. It’s terribly sad.’

Sir Peregrine argues that aristocratic tradition gives Ned a
moral duty to provide for siblings. ‘We just assumed that he would do something
for them, in good time. But of course he never has. So it has come to this.’

Ned, for his part, appears to believe otherwise.

‘Lord Lambton’s will left everything at his death in 2006 to
his only son, having already provided for his other children,’ his lawyers said
this week.

‘Three of Lord Durham’s five sisters are now claiming under
Italian law a share of everything that Lord Lambton ever owned, even assets
that were no longer owned by him at his death.’

The lawyers claim a recent agreement to settle the dispute
‘fell apart’ at the last minute. ‘Lord Durham made a proposal.

Unfortunately his sisters’ lawyer sought to include a term
in the wording of the agreement, which can’t be agreed,’ the lawyers say. ‘An
offer in excess of this sum remains on the table.’

A friend of Ned, meanwhile, tells me he believes the sisters
were ‘looked after’ during their father’s lifetime, and are now being ‘greedy’.

‘The simple fact is that you just can’t keep estates like
this together if everything gets divided equally. The money, the capital, has
to go with them, otherwise they won’t remain a going concern for the next
generation. That’s why we have primogeniture.

‘Tony knew this. He was a very generous man, and a very rich
man. He gave Lucinda her home, for example, which is now worth a million or
two. And he certainly helped Beatrix, so don’t go thinking they got nothing.’

Whoever you believe, the coming legal dispute is certainly
shaping to be a deeply unpleasant.

Indeed, Sir Peregrine says that during the course of the
dispute Ned — whose parents were famously promiscuous — has already gone so far
as to suggest that the sisters might not be Lord Lambton’s biological
daughters.

‘That was completely below the belt,’ he adds. ‘And of
course Ned’s paternity is just as chancy as theirs. When you look at the dates,
the only child who was unquestionably [Lord Lambton’s] is Lucy, actually. The
others are all in question.’

Presumably his rationale is that Lucy was conceived at the
beginning of her parents’ marriage, before they both slipped into a life of
casual adultery.

Should things continue to escalate, it is by no means
impossible that the Earl of Durham and his sisters could be forced to submit to
paternity tests.

So how did a family which supposedly occupies the highest
echelons of polite society become embroiled in a dispute headed for the sort of
denouement you might expect from the Jeremy Kyle show?

Lord Lambton with Belinda Ned and Isabella, in the grounds
of their home at Biddick Hall, County Durham in 1973

Lord (Antony) Lambton is probably to blame. Tall, dark,
handsome, and stupendously rich, he became a Tory MP in 1951 and was seen as a
rising political star.

But he failed to practise the conservatism he preached, was
serially unfaithful to wife Bindy, visited prostitutes regularly and took
drugs.

In 1973, when he was a junior defence minister in Edward
Heath’s government, the News of the World obtained photographs of him in bed
with dominatrix Norma Levy and another woman, smoking cannabis.

After being exposed as her client, Lambton promptly
resigned. In a TV interview with Robin Day, he said he enjoyed visiting
prostitutes because ‘people sometimes like variety’. In a debriefing with MI5,
Lambton added that he had turned to debauchery because of the ‘futility’ of his
day job in government.

Soon afterwards, he was fined £300 for possessing cannabis
and amphetamines, and fled to Italy, where he took up residence at the Villa
Centinale with a mistress, Claire Ward, who had been 1954’s debutante of the
year.

For the ensuing decades, until his death, she and Lambton
held court at the villa, where he was dubbed the ‘King of Chiantishire’ and
famed for hosting drug-fuelled parties.

It was a legendarily debauched existence.

One former lover of his from the era claimed that Lambton
would pay black male prostitutes to sleep with her, while he watched. Countless
others spoke of his relentless libido.

Petronella Wyatt has claimed that he attempted to seduce
her, while she was a teenager, by exposing himself.

House guests over the years included everyone from the
Rolling Stones to Princess Margaret and Prince Charles. In later years, Tony
and Cherie Blair also paid a visit.

Meanwhile, Lambton’s wife Bindy — who died in 2003 —
remained in the UK, with their son Ned, who was 11 at the time of the Norma
Levy scandal and went on to be unhappily educated at Eton.

It is hardly surprising, given these circumstances, that the
current Earl’s adult life would follow an unorthodox course.

Though he’s never had what you might call a day job, Ned did
play guitar with a rock band called the Frozen Turkeys in the Eighties.

In 1983, he married Christabel McEwen, the mother of his
eldest son, Fred, who is now a left-leaning environmental activist.

They split up in the mid-Nineties — she moved swiftly on to
the TV personality Jools Holland — after which Ned took up with second wife
Catherine Fitzgerald, who is now the other half of actor Dominic West.

In 2000, Ned moved to a mud hut on a beach in the
Philippines, saying he wanted ‘to indulge all my Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan
fantasies’ and, shortly afterwards, fathered a daughter called Molly, by
then-girlfriend Jennie Guy, an Irish artist.

He wooed third wife Marina, an old family friend, by sending
her a Facebook message declaring: ‘I know I am way too old for you but I love
you.’

This privileged, if unstructured existence is said by Sir
Peregrine to be at the root of the current family rift.

‘Ned has never been crossed in his life before, a life of
complete self-indulgence,’ he says.

‘This is the first time he’s been questioned by anyone in
his life. And, as someone who shares his father’s wilfulness, he seems to find
that a very disagreeable experience.’

The dispute has been hugely upsetting for Ned’s two other
sisters Rose and Isabella (who is financially secure having married the wealthy
landowner Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland).

Both sides in this legal dispute have not spoken for over a
year, including at family weddings and funerals, where according to Sir
Peregrine ‘we now sit on opposite sides of a large church’.

Of course, the longer things continue, the more both sides
will pay to lawyers. The three sisters say the source of their legal funds is a
‘private matter’, though I understand that their costs are being underwritten
by a wealthy acquaintance of the family who has a property near Villa Cetinale
and is not fond of the Earl.

Ned, meanwhile, has deep pockets, meaning that the dispute
could yet continue for years.

‘If he really wanted to settle this, he could do it
tomorrow,’ adds Sir Peregrine, wearily.

‘We all could. But, sadly, he’s left us no choice but to
pursue this until it brings a result.’

Lord Lambton was forced to resign in 1973, when he was
photographed in bed with two dominatrix prostitutes

Ned Lambton with first bride Christobel on their wedding day
in 1983. The couple divorced in 1995

OH, TO BE IN ITALY . . . Lord of the manor Ned Lambton and
his wife, Marina (with back to camera), sunbathe at the Villa Cetinale with
houseguests, from left: British actress Lily Robinson and French model Leah De
Wavrin. Left, a maid transports a flower arrangement through

the gardens.

The Luck of The Lambtons

In the wake of the 1973 sex scandal that ended his political
career, Antony, Lord Lambton, fled to Tuscany, where he turned the 17th-century
Villa Cetinale into a shabby-chic Shangri-la for his aristocratic pals. Six
years after Lambton’s death, his son, Ned, the seventh Earl of Durham, has
completed a dazzling restoration, James Reginato reports, despite some Downton
Abbey-worthy family drama

Constructed in 1680
and situated on some of the most breathtaking acreage in Tuscany, Villa
Cetinale may be the world’s most delightful haunted house. According to legend,
the builder of the property, Cardinal Flavio Chigi—a nephew of Pope Alexander
VII’s—murdered a rival, as princes of the church were inclined to do in those
days. Some believe the ghost of the vanquished cleric has rattled around
Cetinale ever since. Nevertheless, the magnificent 12-bedroom Baroque villa,
designed by Bernini’s great pupil Carlo Fontana, has endured as “one of the
celebrated pleasure-houses of its day,” as Edith Wharton noted in her 1904
study, Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

In May, Cetinale’s latest chapter began, after Edward
Richard Lambton, the seventh Earl of Durham, known as Ned, moved in following a
five-year renovation. Still, there seems to be a remaining specter or two to
deal with, beginning with Ned’s father, Antony, who died on December 30, 2006,
at the age of 84.

As anyone over a certain age in Britain remembers, the late
Lord Lambton resigned abruptly in 1973 from Prime Minister Edward Heath’s
Cabinet, where he had been a junior defense minister, after being photographed
in bed with two prostitutes and a joint in his mouth. The tryst, in a Maida
Vale flat, had been captured on a hidden camera rigged by the News of the
World. In the annals of great English political sex scandals, the episode ranks
just under the Profumo affair.

Tony, as the longtime Tory M.P. was called by friends, gave
up his political career and went into a grand exile in Italy. In a Lord
Marchmain moment, he left his wife and their six children in Lambton Park,
their enormous estate in County Durham, in the Northeast of England, and
acquired the fabulous but then disheveled Villa Cetinale, near Siena, which was
still owned by the Chigi family. For nearly three decades, Lambton held court
here, with his mistress, Claire Ward. Highly charming at one moment and lacerating
the next, he reigned as the “King of Chiantishire,” as he was dubbed, and
entertained the likes of Prince Charles and Tony Blair. “When you were invited
to Cetinale, you felt like you had really arrived,” recollects an English
grandee.

Upon his father’s death, Ned inherited the earldom and
became the beneficiary of his father’s entire estate, which included 7,000 acres in England.
In accordance with the English practice of primogeniture, his five elder
siblings—females all—were bypassed.

Six years later, Ned has just completed an arduous
renovation that has restored the villa to its glory. Nonetheless, a bit of
drama continues to hover over Cetinale. Some of it is of a happy nature.
Fifty-one-year-old, twice-divorced Ned—who has a 27-year-old son by his first
wife and an 11-year-old daughter with a former girlfriend—surprised his social
circle in March 2010 when he announced his engagement to a longtime family
friend, the very lovely Marina Hanbury, who is 20 years his junior. The couple
married 10 months later and then welcomed a daughter, Lady Stella, last
October.

On the less joyful side, Ned recently stopped speaking to at
least a few of his five sisters—Lady Lucinda, Lady Beatrix, Lady Anne, Lady
Isabella, and Lady Rose—after the first three threatened legal action against
him in a twist that sounds like a Downton Abbey plotline. Because Tony lived so
long in Italy, they contend they are entitled to shares of his estate under the
Napoleonic Code, the revised version of ancient Roman law, upon which Italian
law is still based. Furthermore, Ned’s niece Rose Bowdrey, 39 (Beatrix’s
daughter), who had been managing Cetinale for him, made what has been described
as a stormy departure around the time she began spending time with 52-year-old Domitilla
Getty, wife of Mark Getty (co-founder of Getty Images). The Gettys, who have
three children and who occupied a nearby hamlet, which they had restored,
separated after nearly 30 years of marriage by late 2010, according to reports
in the British press.

Needless to say, there has been plenty of chatter in
Tuscany, and beyond, regarding recent events Up at the Villa.

‘It’s the vibe-iest house in the world,” Lord Johnson
Somerset tells me over drinks by the pool. Somerset, the bon-vivant youngest son
of the Duke of Beaufort and a music producer for Bryan Ferry, is part of a
merry weekend house party of close friends who have come from England to help
Ned inaugurate the newly renovated villa this past May. Like most members of
this group, Somerset was also a guest here in the old days.

Marina, who is cradling in her arms the angelic-looking
Stella, came here first as a baby herself, brought by her parents, Emma and
Timmy Hanbury, scion of an old brewery family, who are here for the weekend,
too. Even before they met each other, both Timmy and Emma came to Cetinale, as
they were Lambton-family friends. Emma was a frequent visitor in the late 70s
when she was the girlfriend of Jasper Guinness, who lived nearby. Cetinale
itself has just been redecorated by Camilla Guinness, who was Jasper’s wife
from 1985 until his death, last year.

Over lunch in the garden, near a magnificent avenue of
towering cypress trees on the 165-acre property, Emma talks about Cetinale then
and now: “When I first came here, I was blown away by its beauty. But Tony and
Claire lived here in a very unflash way. It was incredibly nice and relaxed,
but, let’s just say … by the pool you had a couple of rickety chairs and towels
thrown around. Ned has preserved the history of the house, but now it’s like a
five-star hotel.”

The Cetinale veterans at the table all agree, too, how
vastly the food has improved, thanks to the first-rate chef Ned just hired, who
blends classic Italian cuisine with Asian influences. Though reminiscing about
the English nursery-school fare served in the old days seems to amuse
everybody—when Prince Charles came to lunch, he was served fish pie, reportedly
frozen, from Marks & Spencer.

“It was disgusting,” Ned recalls of Cetinale’s former
cuisine. “Mrs. Ward, instead of hiring a chef, had these Australian girls on
their gap years do the cooking,” he explains. “I wasn’t here when Prince
Charles visited, but he went to Gordonstoun, where the food is horrid, so it
must have reminded him of his childhood. He may have liked it.”

Alean, lanky fellow with handsome features, Ned Lambton has
a wonderfully dry English sense of humor. And he is refreshingly honest about
the class he comes from. “I can’t claim that I worked,” he tells me that
evening over drinks in a vaulted-ceilinged salon.

“We’ve always lived in County Durham,” he says. “Some people
look down on me because the Earldom of Durham was only created in 1833.” The first earl, he
recounts, was John George Lambton, a radical Whig statesman who served as
ambassador to Russia and governor-general of Canada.

“I loathed Eton,” he continues. “My father hated Harrow, so
he sent me to Eton. His father had hated Eton, so he sent him to Harrow. How
much nicer it would be to stay home, under the loving roof of your mother and
father … ” This last sentence he delivers with faux wistfulness.

Which brings the conversation to his father’s scandal, which
exploded when Ned was 11. “It was on the front pages of the newspapers. They
kept them away from me, so I didn’t know what was going on. But one day the
school matron took me in her room. I remember her explaining it to me. She
didn’t explain it very well.

“She said, ‘Your father went to see a woman.’ She didn’t
explain what kind of woman or what he did with her. I was mystified. I later
found out what ‘went to see’ means. When it was explained it was about sex, I
understood it better, but this vital fact was kept from me.”

As the scandal raged and school holidays arrived, Ned’s
parents took him and his sisters to a private island in the Bahamas. “We hid
out there until it had died down,” Ned recalls. “Then everybody forgot about
it—except for the fucking Daily Mail. They mention it again and again, to this
day. Can’t bear the Daily Mail.”

In the 33 years between when the scandal broke and Lord
Lambton’s death, not once did he discuss the matter with his son. “He never
mentioned it. He knew we knew about it. That was enough. I don’t know what we
would have discussed. As far as my father was concerned, he got caught, he
resigned, and that was the end of the story.”

In an interview he once gave to a British journalist,
Lambton was unrepentant. Pressed to explain his actions, he replied, “People
sometimes like variety. I think it’s as simple as that.”

(Norma Levy, one of the prostitutes he had patronized, was
then reputed to be London’s most sought-after dominatrix, with a client list
said to include Stavros Niarchos, the Shah of Iran, the 11th Duke of
Devonshire, and John Paul Getty. In 2007, Levy gave an interview—to the Daily
Mail, natch—in which she recalled some of those clients’ proclivities.
According to Levy, Getty would have her lie down in an open coffin and he would
then just stare at her for an hour.)

Today, Ned looks at the scandal philosophically. “If it
hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t have resigned and moved to Italy and we wouldn’t
be sitting here now. So thank you, Norma Levy, prostitute.”

In the ensuing decades, Lord Lambton would occasionally come
home to County Durham and rejoin his family for Christmases, or to take part in
shoots on his estates. He remained married to Ned’s mother, Belinda, who was
called Bindy, until her death, in 2003. “She was what is politely known as an
eccentric,” explains Ned. “My mother lived in a sort of make-believe world
where everything was ideal. We knew it wasn’t, but since she thought it was we
didn’t suggest otherwise, because we knew it was futile. Her fantasies were
frustrating if you didn’t go along.”But Bindy was not so blithe as to allow her
teenage son to go off to Italy to stay with her husband and his mistress.
“Because he was living with Mrs. Ward, she wouldn’t allow me to come here. I
didn’t come until I was about 16, and even then I had to make things up, like
saying I was going to France. But then I started coming here regularly and fell
in love with it.”

Needless to say, Lambton was not particularly hands-on as a
parent. An early, rare effort to mold Ned was not a success. “After I left
Eton, my father told me he had a friend in Argentina. So I was sent to
Argentina to become a man. Didn’t work.”

Back in England, a brief career playing the electric guitar
in an acid-rock band he formed called the Frozen Turkeys followed. “We played
the Marquee club once, which for a band is supposed to be a step on the ladder
to making it, which we certainly didn’t. It was great fun, but I’m glad it’s
over,” he says. (Currently he plays acoustic guitar in a country-music band,
Pearl, TN, which has just released a debut album, Leave Me Alone.)

In 1997 he stood for Parliament, in Jimmy Goldsmith’s
Referendum Party. The run, in his father’s old constituency of
Berwick-upon-Tweed, was quixotic. “I knew I wasn’t going to get elected, but
that was part of the attraction of doing it,” he says. “I wouldn’t have wanted
to be an M.P., but it was fascinating to go knocking on people’s doors up
there.”

In 2000 he moved to a remote beach in the Philippines, where
he lived for about six years in a grass-roofed house he had built. “People ask
me, ‘Why the Philippines?’ If I showed you one picture of the spot I lived, you
would understand. I was able to indulge all my Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan
fantasies.”

But it wasn’t all playtime. Through a dish antenna he
installed at the domicile, he communicated constantly with the manager of the
family estates. By then, Tony had ceded most responsibilities to his son.
Notwithstanding Ned’s self-effacing statements, running big properties such as
these is serious work.

The seventh Earl of Durham’s agreeable manner extends to his
former wives and girlfriends. “We are all still very good friends,” he says. In
1995 he ended his 12-year marriage to Christabel McEwen, granddaughter of a
Scottish baronet who is the mother of his heir, Frederick, Viscount Lambton,
and married Catherine FitzGerald, daughter of the 29th Knight of Glin, a union
that lasted seven years. Through a short relationship with Jennie Guy, an Irish
artist, he has a daughter, Molly, 11, who lives with her mother in Dublin.

Attempting to break the family cycle of public-school
misery, Ned sent Fred to the liberal Bedales School. But then a friend
persuaded Fred to transfer to the more traditional Stowe. “He absolutely hated
it,” says Ned. “One day he rang me up and said, ‘I’ve run away from school. I’m
at the Savoy hotel.’ I thought it showed a bit of style that he checked in
there.”

Lambton says he is proud of his son’s post-collegiate work
as an environmental activist, but had concerns about an occupational hazard.
“He kept getting arrested,” Ned recounts (protesting airport expansions, etc.).

In late 2009, Ned’s life was transformed. It started with a
dream, near, of all places, Seattle, where he was preparing to embark on a
voyage across the Pacific on the Lone Wolf, his Nordhavn long-range motorboat.
“I had this dream that Marina and I were married. We were in love and
blissfully happy.” Then he woke up in his rented house. “I’ve known Marina
forever. But I never thought I would end up with her. There is a 20-year age
gap,” he explains. Hanbury, who had worked as a model and also was a
parliamentary assistant, came to Cetinale nearly every summer of her
adolescence on holidays with her parents.

But that morning, Ned contacted Marina via Facebook and
confessed his dream to her. “I know I am way too old for you but I love you,”
he explained to her.

A day later, he was amazed by the reply. “I told him I’d
loved him since I was 18,”
Marina recounts to me. “I’d always had a crush on him, but I felt it was
unrealistic. I never thought anything would happen. But we met up for dinner in
London, and three weeks later we were engaged.” The pair married in a London
register office in January 2011. “We both felt so sure,” says Ned. “And it has
turned out great. We are very happy and compatible. And as Marina has pointed
out to me, I can’t afford another divorce,” he says with a laugh. Ned and
Marina kept their romance quiet in its first months, however, which made the
announcement of their engagement a happy surprise for most friends and family.
But the gossip mill was soon distracted by the new friendship between Ned’s
niece Rose, who is known as Ro-Ro, and Domitilla Getty. “When Ned and Marina
got together we were like, wow,” says a family friend. “But then Domitilla and
Ro-Ro got together, and it was WOW. Domitilla and Ro-Ro trumped Ned and
Marina.” (Around the same time, there had been another momentous match in the
Hanbury family, when Marina’s younger sister, Rose, married David Rocksavage,
the seventh Marquess of Cholmondeley, who is the Queen’s Lord Great Chamberlain
and lives at Houghton Hall, one of England’s greatest stately homes.)

Restoring Cetinale was a daunting task. While Ned’s father
and Mrs. Ward had done a spectacular job restoring the garden, which is
considered one of the most beautiful in Italy, they had done little more than
spruce up the ancient building itself. So it fell to Ned to replace the roof,
as well as the plumbing, wiring, heating, and so forth.

For interior decoration, he turned to London-based Camilla
Guinness. “My main aim was to alter the villa as little as possible. Barring
[extensive] damage by dog pee to all the curtains and gilded table legs, and a
shortage of bathrooms, it was pretty perfect the way it was,” Guinness says.
“The real challenge was to make sure things weren’t over-restored and to try to
keep the patina of walls and furniture.”

“What Camilla has done is amazing,” says Marina, the
Countess of Durham, “but the house has still got all its charm and magic.”

It remains to be seen, however, if the potential legal
challenge introduced by the Lambton sisterhood will alter Cetinale’s future.
Ned does not appear to be particularly worried. “My father was an Englishman,
and it’s an English will,” he says. The lawyers who wrote the document for his
parent knew what they were doing, he reveals. Estate planners—and
screenwriters—take note: “Cetinale is not legally owned by me, but by the
trustees of a company set up by my father, Cetinale, Ltd., based in New
Zealand,” he explains. “I am a beneficiary of this trust and run the company on
its behalf.

“Why they are threatening to sue now, when I got on with
them for 50 years, I don’t know,” says Ned. “But whatever the court decides—if
it comes to that … ” he says, his voice trailing off. “My lawyer told me it
might take 20 years, so I will let you know in 20 years. But if [my sisters]
want to pay lawyers it’s not for me to stop them.”

Four months later, however, a thaw in the frost seemed to be
setting in. On September 15, Ned e-mailed to report that lines of communication
with his siblings were open, “so perhaps the whole sorry mess can be sorted
out.” A day earlier, an attorney representing the sisters called to tell me his
clients were hoping to resolve the situation “by diplomatic means.” He added,
however, that the ladies “are quite resolute” in the goal.

According to a longtime family friend, what blame there is
lies with the siblings’ late father: “It’s Tony’s fault. He failed to make
provisions for them.” (“Them” is meant to apply as well to Claire Ward, who was
also left out of Lord Lambton’s will and departed Cetinale immediately after he
died. She lives in Hampshire today.)

But, of course, the situation is owed to England’s custom of
primogeniture.

For wisdom on this practice, I recall a conversation I had a
few years ago with someone who knows its consequences as well as
anyone—Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. In 2007, following the death
of her husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, she had to vacate her 297-room
home, Chatsworth, after 50-some years. “It’s deeply unfair and very wise,” she
sums up about primogeniture. “We were all brought up with the idea of it, so no
good grumbling about it. That’s just how it ’tis.”

Her experiences on the Continent, seeing the fruits of the
Napoleonic Code, never persuaded her to alter her opinion. “The old ladies and
everyone all live in a heap together I cannot imagine anything more conducive
to family rows,” she says. And those big houses are practically empty, too, “as
every child has had a go at the furniture and the pictures.”

But, on the basis of a weekend at Cetinale, it would appear
that there is little more conducive to happiness than possession of a fabulous
Tuscan villa. At the end of a long, excellent dinner, the table having gone
through countless bottles of Brunello, Somerset has everyone in stitches as he
recounts tales of his gaffes when the Queen weekended at Badminton House, his
family’s fabled estate in Gloucestershire. Then ghost stories are traded, and
the conversation turns to Cetinale’s resident spirit.